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Saturday, March 23, 2013

`A Great Ring of Pure and Endless Light'

The
notion of “oldest light,” of light even having a meaningful age, reminds us of
our diminutive place in creation. Our vision is touchingly limited. In galactic
terms, we hardly see across the room. We’re deft enough to build and launch the
Planck Surveyor satellite, but small enough to be awed by or indifferent to its findings:

That
the new data suggests our universe is marginally older than we previously
supposed is interesting, but the reality of seeing light born a mere 370,000
years after the Big Bang defies understanding. It reminds me, on a radically
different scale, of hearing the voice of a French singer recorded in 1860. It
also reminds me that the poets were there first, in the seventeenth century.
Think of these lines from Thomas Traherne’s “Innocence”: